Missionaries Compelled to Close Primary Schools Peking, Mar. 15.
'A number of American mission boards, with officials in Peking, have been informed that they will have ive up their efforts to establish unary education for adults and children in several Chinese provinees.
The agitation of youthful nationalists is considered to be ible for regulations in inees, i Honan and Shantung, limit their educational activities to higher schools, and that religious instruction must be entirely voluntary in these.
American and Canadian missions operating in Honan province attempted to ignore the provincial regulation made two years ago the effect that they must give up their primary schools. The missionaries argued that the government was doing very little to establish primary education, and that there jeould be no serious objection to missionaries doing what nobody else was trying to do. So two or three lof the missions went ahead quietly with their primary schools, in spite of the Government's prohibition. About 50 stich schools were conducted in different parts of the province, especially in rural districts.
For a time, the schools were permitted to continue without interference, the missionaries limiting their religious instruction so as not to offend nationalist agitators. They Jwere particularly interested in aplying the principles of the mass-education movement to adult farmers and their wives, teaching them to read and write their own lange uuage: But a fow weeks ago the nationalist agitators learned about the missionary primary schools and they protested to provincial officials that foreign missionaries were breaking the laws, surreptitiously introducing "imperialist doctrines." It were far better, they declared, had winked at the violation of regulations, were compelled to act. They isted orders instructing the ifssionaries to close all primary [schools, and not to reopen them, on pain of expulsion from the province. While the mission: they retain their rights, cannot be expelled good and sufficient reason, they cannot safely violate the laws of the province and antagonize the authorities.
The National Government contends that primary education should be entirely in the hands of Chinese, that national characteristics may be preserved, but the missionaries argue, with apparently good sense, that willing to turn over all primary education to the Chinese when they are woady to u@lertake it, but that at present most of the Chinese can get no education except from foreigners—United Press.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.